One step forward, two steps back Cardiff finish their home season with another defeat.

Following the very good win over Southampton seven days ago, it’s been a week where those who want Cardiff City manager Erol Bulut to stay in the job for next season have been able to put their case almost unopposed.

Straight after the Southampton match, Bulut was serenaded by choruses of “we want you to stay” as he and his team took the plaudits for what I reckon was our best home win of the season. The Monday night podcast that I’m in the habit of listening to has been anti Bulut for most of 2024, but this time the four man panel was split on what City should next, but this was as of nothing compared to what Wales Online were pumping out as their readership were told it would be “madness” to get rid of Erol Bulut.

Rightly or wrongly (probably rightly), the feeling has grown that the responsibility for the uncertainty over what’s going to happen next regarding the manager lies with Vincent Tan. The perception is that Bulut is very much Chairman Mehmet Dalman’s man and the owner had to be  persuaded into the appointment – the season is now all but completed and the fact that we still don’t know whether the Bulut experiment is to be continued suggests that Mr Tan was reluctantly persuaded.

It’s clear that a substantial proportion of City fans want Bulut to stay, but someone unfamiliar with the workings of the club could be forgiven for believing that they amount to an overwhelming majority if they were to go by what’s been sung, said and written on the subject in the past seven days.

If, like me, you do not want to see Erol Bulut stay, it’s been a week to maybe keep schtum while realising that, even if you might be in the minority (there’s no real evidence on this either way mind), it is, in all likelihood, a large minority.

Ill willingly admit that there is one big reason that the Bulut to stay camp can build their case on and I don’t have too much to argue back with – we are going to finish around ten points and ten places better off than we did last season.

I heard a discussion on the radio last week on the subject of at what age you are classed as “old”? The best answer I heard was the jokey it’s always five years older than you are, but, as someone who very often feels every one of my sixty eight years old, it was reassuring to hear that there were those who said I still have seven, or maybe even twelve, years to go before I should consider myself old!

Anyway, that digression is a prelude to me saying you know you’re getting old when a football season seems to whizz by in almost the blink of an eye. It really does feel like only yesterday when I was reading predictions that tended to put us in eighteenth (our normal predicted finish in recent seasons) or worse – I can’t remember a pre season since we returned to this level twenty one years ago when so many pundits had us finishing in the bottom three. For myself, I thought eighteenth wasn’t going to be too far out – I’d make encouraging noises about a top half finish, but wouldn’t really believe it, So, to finish no lower than twelfth is an achievement, no doubt about it.

Up to now, I’ve concentrated on opinions voiced locally, but if the subject has come up on the national podcasts and You Tube videos about the Championship I take in, there is an air of incredulity at the managerial situation being dragged out like it is – the uniform view is that Bulut should be Cardiff manager going into 24/25.

However, I really don’t believe it’s as straightforward as that. I’ve said before on here that the nature of the football played by City over the past decade or so has made me change the way I support my team. Maybe it was because I spent the first twelve years or so of this century watching largely successful City teams playing a pretty entertaining brand of football that my attitude became even more that the result was everything than it had been previously – I was taking the entertainment factor for granted, why wouldn’t I when players like Earnie, Kav, Koumas, Whittingham, Chopra, Bothroyd and Burke were performing for my team?

I always used to say that no matter how dull the game, Whitts would still do something in it which would have me purring. This was the first inkling of something that has become more profound with me as the years of attritional, defensive, physical and direct football mounted up – the result is no longer everything, I want some entertainment, some signs as to why football is called the beautiful game.

Erol Bulut’s City side do not provide that. To be fair to him, the old long ball approach is all but gone now, but,  for every Ipswich and Southampton, there have been four Leeds or Birminghams at home this season, we have been so dull to watch, particularly at home. 

Today was our final home match and, in line with the theme of improvement, we end the season with a better home record than we had in the preceding three. Unfortunately, that is more a commentary on how bad we were between 2021 and 2023 – it’s tempting, but not quite true, to say that only at Cardiff could ten home defeats and thirty two home goals conceded be viewed as an upturn!

I might go into the freakish nature of some of City’s stats for this season next week, but what I think they say is that is that, top half finish or not, the improvements we need to make to become genuine top six challengers are far greater than the amount that would have to go wrong for us to plunged back into a relegation struggle – we win, but it’s always by a single goal margin and when we lose, it’s by two or more.

The football under Erol Bulut has been deadly dull for most of the time and I would argue that the improvement this season has tended to be built on sand. 

I’m not going to go into any detail on today’s match – I thought 4-1 was very harsh on us as, rarely for City, we had quite a few chances and after a season where our strikers have been blamed for many of our woes for not scoring goals when barely any opportunities were being created for them, Turnbull, Goutas, twice, Ashford and Robinson all missed decent chances of varying difficulty.

Middlesbrough were largely in careless, end of season mood for much of the first half, but they’re are a confident side who are finishing the season well whereas it’s tended to be one step forward and two back with City since October. Middlesbrough are also used to scoring goals and the difference in finishing quality between the teams today was marked.

I’d say today confirmed a feeling I’ve had for a while – Erol Bulut may have improved various aspects of our game compared to last season, but I think the 22/23 strugglers were better defensively than this team – Middlesbrough wouldn’t have scored four against last season’s defence.

The first Middlesbrough goal came just before half time when Famala Diedhiou lost his man, Matt Clarke, from a free kick and the defender scored via the underside of the bar. Middlesbrough then scored at will in the early minutes of the second half as a series of weak challenges allowed Finn Azaz to make it 2-0 from close range, then Josh Bowler lost possession cheaply and a long ball over the top enabled the in form Emanuelle Latte Lath to out sprint Nat Phillips and score easily. 

All three goals could have been defended a lot better, but Alex Gilbert’s strike from the edge of the area to make it 4-0 was a quality effort.

 Middlesbrough rather sat back after that and City spent the last half an hour seeking consolation goals with one arriving in added time when goalkeeper Seny Dieng, who made fine saves to deny Turnbull and Goutas, presented the ball to Callum Robinson and he crossed for Josh Bowler to roll into an empty net.

Looking for positives from the game, I’d say it was all but impossible to blame the younger players who’ve been given a chance in the last two games for what went wrong – the main damage had been done by the time most of them got oe the pitch. The exception was Cian Ashford who started the game on the left and after playing like a normal winger for much of the Southampton game, was more of a Bulut winger this time (i.e. he spent about eighty per cent of the time behind the ball). It was maybe a dose of reality after last week for Ashford, but there were still a few signs that he has the ability to play much more first team football for the club.

As for the others, both Lucy Giles and Raheem Conte repeated the positive impression they had given on their debuts the previous weekend, with the former looking unflustered in his play on the left and the latter adding things at right back in an attacking sense that his seniors in the position Perry Ng (voted Player of the season for the second year on the trot last night) and Mahlon Romeo struggle to provide.

There was also an overdue league debut for Joel Colwill who was brought on at 3-0 down with about thirty five minutes to play. Unfortunately, Joel’s elder brother was absent through injury and so we’ll have to wait a bit longer for the two of them to be on the pitch at the same time in a league match, but on yesterday’s evidence, it will happen eventually – Joel coming on didn’t represent a step down in quality in City’s midfield, quite the opposite really, as City were able to

A very young City under 18 side took on Fleetwood at Leckwith this lunchtime and won 2-0 thanks to goals from Alyas Debono and Mannie Barton with a penalty.

In the PremierDivision of the Highadmit SouthWales Alliance Premier League, Treherbert Boys and Girls Club kept their faint title hopes alive with a 1-0 win at Tonyrefail.

Posted in Football in the Rhondda valleys., Out on the pitch, The kids. | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Seven decades of Cardiff City v Middlesbrough matches.

Another season is almost over with our final home game tomorrow against Middlesbrough. It may seem odd that having watched so many poor, defensively minded and thrill free games at Cardiff City Stadium over the past nine months or so that this has been City’s best home campaign since 20/21 when we reached the Play Offs.

What that goes to show is just how bad we’ve been at home in the previous three seasons – this time around we have ten wins and nine defeats with the one match to play, so even if we lose to Boro, we’ll have not lost more home matches than we’ve won for the first time since the days of Lee Tomlin.

I usually have a not too successful stab at predicting the outcome of upcoming matches in these quiz pieces, but I’m not going to bother this time because I think anything is possible except for a really big City win (we don’t do them at home any more).

Middlesbrough, widely tipped for the Play Offs or maybe even better, before a ball was kicked have been one of the most inconsistent sides in the division this season, but were finishing it well until they were beaten 4-3 at home by Leeds on Monday – they have the talent to beat us quite easily, but it’s not always applied and we’re at a stage if the season now where a match between two teams with nothing to play for could be a great spectacle or the dullest of 0-0s depending on the attitude of the participants.

In his pre game press conference yesterday, Erol Bulut revealed that Yakou Meite will miss the final two matches with injury, but Josh Bowler and Callum Robinson are over the sickness which kept them out last week, so it would seem that nearly all of the youngsters who were in the squad last week should be again this time – hopefully, that will ensure that the game isn’t that dullest of 0-0s that I mentioned earlier.

Here’s seven Middlesbrough related questions from previous decades, I’ll post the answets on Sunday.

60s. With a nickname which was suggestive of a kind of frivolity and a surname which was anything but frivolous, this “wing half” (defensive midfielder) never played professionally in his native country during a long career which crossed two decades. He started out with lower league ground sharers who were a few years off the most dramatic period in the club’s history. He signed for Middlesbrough after five years at his first club and was at Ayresome Park for a year longer being a regular selection for most of that time. His final club were close to Middlesbrough geographically, but have never really be considered rivals of theirs. When our man retired after four years at his latest club, he was given the manager’s job, but lost it at the end of his second season when he was harshly sacked after a failed promotion bid, who am I describing?

70s. This Leeds born defender who acquired the nickname Rambo at his second club (unlike our Rambo, the nickname came from his uncompromising style of play), signed for Middlesbrough in the middle of this decade, but never played a game for them. His signing for a lower division side hundreds of miles to the south was finalised at football’s first ever transfer tribunal and it was at this club that he made the transformation to First Division defender as his team made it into the top flight for their first, and only so far, promotion to the First Division. When his time came to leave after eleven years during which he’d mostly been an automatic choice in the starting line up, his career still had another six years to run at a club closer to home that had a bigger reputation than the one he’d just left, but had hit on hard times for a while and they remained in the lower divisions before he left for non league football in 1995, who is he?

80s. Senile, but brave Northerner is transformed into Middlesbrough legend. (6,6)

90s. Stephen Pears was a long serving Middlesbrough goalkeeper whose career at the club covered two decades, why is he unique out of all of the players who have played for the club since their formation?

00s. Pencil perhaps combines with something which features in a conversation (which I was going to say was between two insects, but actually, I’d be wrong to do so) to reveal an England international.

10s. We were once linked to signing this defensive midfielder who has won forty seven caps for his country. Ironically, his first club and the one he plays for now are ones that we played in the European Cup Winners Cup half a century or more ago. He’s played for three English teams, but only one of them on a permanent basis – they play in the same colours as us and they loaned him out to stripy Yorkshiremen and Middlesbrough. He played in a losing cause for Boro at Cardiff City Stadium, but can you name him?

20s. Cardiff born, he’s played for a Welsh club, but has played internationally for another country. He’s now left Middlesbrough and has recently signed for a club, which play in hoops, that was managed by a Welshman earlier in the season, who is he?

Answers

60s. Perth born Ray “Yogi” Yeoman signed for Northampton (who would make the quickest ascent from Fourth Division to First in football history during the sixties only to fall all the way back again in record time over the few years) in the early fifties and moved to Middlesbrough in 1958. Six years later, after making more than 200 league appearances for Boro, Yeoman signed for Darlington and was their manager from 1968 to 1970.

70s. Gary Briggs signed for Oxford United having not played in Middlesbrough’s first team and played over four hundred league games for them – he was also in the Oxford team which beat QPR in the 1986 League Cup Final. Briggs signed for Blackpool in 1995 and dropped out of league football at the age of thirty six when he joined Chorley.

80s.  Bernie Slaven.

90s. Pears scored the last ever goal at Ayresome Park in his testimonial game when he scored a penalty to seal a 3-1 win for Boro over a Peter Beardsley select team in 1995.

00s. Ray Parlour (a ray of light could be referred to a pencil of light and the fly was invited to “come into my parlour” by the spider).

10s. Bosnian international Muhamed Besic was once a transfer target of ours. It would have been during his first spell with his current club Ferencvaros of Hungary (who we played in the Cup Winners Cup in 1974/75). Besic’s first club was SV Hamburg, the team which, famously, beat us with the last kick of the game in our Semi Final against them in the same competition in 1968. 

In the event, Besic signed for Everton in 2014 and spent seven years with them mainly as squad cover. Everton loaned Besic to Middlesbrough for the closing months of the 17/18 season and he made his debut for them in a 1-0 defeat at Cardiff City Stadium. He spent the following season on loan at Boro as well and then he was loaned to Sheffield United for the 19/20 season, but struggled to get much game time.

20s. Graham Kavanagh’s son Callum was born during Kav’s stay with City and was loaned to Newport County by Middlesbrough last season. Callum has played for the Republic of Ireland’s under 17 side and in January he signed a two and a half year deal with Mark Hughes’ old club, Bradford City.

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